Prelude
by cellotlix
Summary: On the last day of their Citadel leave, Shepard and Kaidan make music. Fluff, smut, and just a hint of angst.


**AN: This little one shot is a gift to Seacilin, who was one of my tumblr follower giveaway winners! (And you should all go follow her if you are on tumblr because her blog is fantastic, seriously!). Her prompt was '****_I kind of liked the idea of a spin on the bit in the Citadel DLC where Liara plays the piano … but instead, Kaidan starts to play and it turns out that Shepard can play as well. Maybe they sit down and start to play a piece together?" _****Feel free to drop me a review if you liked! Thanks for reading!**

Shepard slept late that morning. Kaidan watched her curl into the warm spot in bed where he'd been only a moment before, her fingers twisting around the sheets, her legs pulled up to her chest.

He had gotten pretty good at being able to tell which nights were peaceful for her and which involved nightmares. She shuddered once or twice but her brow remained free of cold sweat, and eight hours later she was still asleep. He couldn't remember the last time that'd happened; these days he'd wake up to find her pacing her cabin or hunched over her console, feverishly planning missions and filing reports.

He gently tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and his fingers brushed her cheekbone. As he watched her shift under his hands, something wordless and tender and wanting rose up in his chest. And though he wanted nothing more than to fold himself around her and press his lips to the hollow at her throat, to bring his hands to cup her breasts, to wander lower, he did not. Instead, he prayed that she would sleep like this all morning; god knew she needed the rest.

The light from the nebula streamed through the window shutters, and though it wasn't quite like any dawn Kaidan had ever seen on Earth, he still found it beautiful. Shepard's Citadel apartment was positively bathed in light, haloing every slick surface in the room, throwing gorgeous patterns of bright shadow.

They had to leave soon; he knew that. The war would not wait for them forever, not while people died and the Reapers advanced. But how he wished the war was over, so they could stay in this enchanted place, so reminiscent of their time in Chicago. They'd done enough; more than enough. They'd earned a rest. Shepard especially. He remembered the last nights, where she'd suffered night terrors so bad that she woke in full flashback, shuddering hard enough to shake the whole bed.

He thought he would make her breakfast while she slept, so on this last day she wouldn't want for anything. With a nostalgic smile, he padded to the kitchen and set out to make omelets, knowing that she would understand the reference, and hoping it would make her smile.

But before he could crack the eggs and set to work, a glimmer in the corner of the room caught his eye. It was the grand piano by the front door, the light catching over the smoothly polished surface and reflecting into the room.

Kaidan hadn't properly noticed it at first – they'd been distracted by the latest disaster (in the shape of a clone), so in truth he hadn't really gotten a good look at anything in this apartment. The piano surprised him; he hadn't ever really pegged Anderson as a musician, though that wasn't really the man's fault. He was all business, even more so than Shepard (which was hardly possible, considering it took concentrated effort to get Shepard to take a day to relax when there were things to be done).

How many years had it been since he played? Quite a few. He wasn't an outstanding musician by any reckoning except maybe his mother's, who tended to view anything he did as wonderful. The province of mothers alone, he supposed.

Carefully lifting the lid, he took a seat at the bench and splayed his fingers over the ivory keys, testing the weight of them, the texture. He wouldn't play now – not while Shepard slept – but maybe after she woke he'd try to pick up the pieces of the last prelude he'd learned before joining the service.

"Do you play?" Shepard asked over his shoulder.

He didn't turn. "Not very well," he said, shrugging. "I didn't want to wake you."

"You didn't," she assured him, and she took a seat beside him on the bench.

It occurred to him as he gazed at her that he'd spent more time mourning her than loving her; these nights where they shared the same bed and the mornings where they woke up beside each other were still uncommon, made beautiful by novelty. So perhaps he could be forgiven for staring, but he didn't think he'd ever seen something so beautiful; hair mused, clad in tank and boxer shorts, pulling a paper thin wrap over her shoulders. The light caught in her red hair, like a fiery halo.

He cleared his throat. "Why do I get the feeling you're just saying that?"

"I'm not, I swear. You're hardly making any noise at all. Just slept too long."

"Not too long – you needed the rest."

She waved this away. "So you play 'not well.' I bet you play wonderfully and just say that you don't because you're insufferably modest."

"Insufferably! What would give you that idea?"

"You're insufferably modest about anything you do well."

He rubbed the back of his neck, caught. "Yeah well. It's been a long time since I played anything seriously."

"I bet you were a concert pianist. Playing gigs all over the globe. Beautiful sonatas flowing from your fingers, and all the while screaming fans in the audience hold up homemade posters with your name written in glitter. After the show, they beg to be taken backstage, but your manager keeps you on a tight leash. Instead, you give them your autograph and shake their hand, and they frame the napkin you signed and never wash their hands again. It gets gross."

"Are you having fun?" he grinned.

"Kaidan the classical rock star," she smirked. "I can see it now."

"The classical world isn't really like that," he told her.

"So you do know!"

He sighed in defeat. "I know a little, I guess. My mom was a pianist, a real one. She played with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra pretty often."

"No shit?"

"Yeah. One of my first memories is watching her play the Beethoven's fifth piano concerto."

"The Emperor!"

He stared at her. "Yeah, that's right. How did you know?"

"I had a little keyboard of my own and a lot of recordings. Probably nowhere near the level of you and your mom."

"Now why do I doubt that?"

"Hush. Tell me about listening to your mom playing Beethoven."

He smiled, charmed by her enthusiasm and the memory in equal measure. "I was . . . five, I think? Dad told me beforehand that I had to be perfectly quiet, because if I was making noise I wouldn't be able to listen with my whole body, and that was the only way to enjoy the music."

"I like that. Listening with your whole body."

"It's something to keep in mind, even outside a concert hall. I remember the people sitting behind us looking at me nervously, because they expected me to fidget and make noise and basically ruin the entire concert for them. But I was quiet; I was fascinated. We were sitting so close that I could see her fingers flying over the keys, so gracefully that they hardly seemed to touch at all.

"And the music itself . . . I don't really have the words. I could sit here for years and still never find them. But I'll tell you this; my dad is kind of a taciturn guy. He doesn't talk much, doesn't smile much. Look up stoic and you'll find his picture. But when she played the last note, he was the first one on his feet, and I've never seen him smile so big, before or since."

"That's beautiful," she said, pressing one of the keys wistfully, and the note hung in the air between them. "That's love."

"Yeah. You can say a lot about him, but he loves my mom."

"They probably have some beautiful, romantic meet cute story, right?"

"Hah. Maybe."

"Well, don't keep me in suspense!"

He covered her hand with his own. "They met in Singapore. My dad was stationed there, and my mom was one of the regularly featured pianists with the SSO."

"Jesus. So she was a real professional."

"Yeah. She retired after I was born. She'd play sometimes with Vancouver, but nothing like the days before she met my dad. She was in pretty high demand then; neither of them would admit that, but I found a lot of recordings and news spots. He wasn't a big music buff himself, but one of the guys he was stationed with was a fan of hers, so he dragged my dad to one of her concerts on a night off. He'd never say it in these terms, but it was love at first sight for him. He went to every single one after that."

"But how did they meet?"

"Mom saw him in the audience. She started looking for him, started counting on him being there. And she'd smile when she saw him in the audience and he'd get all embarrassed, but he never stopped coming. This went on for weeks and weeks, until one night he wasn't there. And she was so terrified something had happened to him that she played terribly, or so she says. She knew he was military because he always came in his dress blues – it was the only nice thing he owned, being a poor serviceman and all. So after the concert she ran to the base and asked around for him, though she didn't know his name or anything about him other than the fact that he was tall, quiet, dark, and he came to all her concerts."

"Oh my god," Shepard said, covering her smile with her hands. "And then?"

"Well, I mean it was an Alliance base. It wasn't like they would let her wander around the grounds looking for someone she didn't even know, because that's pretty suspicious. Never mind that she's a young woman, barely five feet tall, still dressed in her concert gown. But eventually they figured out who she was talking about, so they bring out … my dad's friend."

"Oh my god!" Shepard laughed. "No!"

"Yes. Because he'd been so vocal about being her fan, you know."

"But she knew he wasn't the right man, right?"

"Well, of course. And let me tell you, my dad's friend was gutted. She took one look at him and declared 'it's not him' to the room at large. But he was the one who managed to figure out that my mom's mystery man was his shy buddy who'd been slipping away to her concerts for the last few months. He informs her that my dad didn't come that night because he'd come down with a pretty bad flu; they practically tied him down to his bed, because he was deliriously insisting that he couldn't miss the concert."

"I bet she knew right then," Shepard said. "Before they'd even said a word to each other."

"They're not really flowery declaration types, but I always thought so too."

She elbowed him. "You're a romantic."

"You knew that already."

She squeezed his fingers. "So then what happened?"

"She came by every day until he'd recovered. My dad's friend informed him that the gorgeous pianist with the SSO had been asking around for him, making a scene at base, completely love-struck already. And he thought his friend was just messing around with him, because everyone knew that he'd developed a fascination. He never confessed this to me because it was usually Mom telling the story, but knowing my dad, I always got the feeling that those days laid up in the infirmary were pretty rough for him, and that he probably spent the whole time trying to figure out what to say to this woman, because she'd seen him; she knew that he'd come to her concerts, and not because he loved the music, but because he loved her.

"So he gets better and goes out to meet her. And they end up staring at each other like dopes, completely at a loss for words. He said to me that she was smaller than she seemed on stage, but at the same time larger – like she took up more space in his sight. Finally she blurts out 'I'm Kathryn' and he says 'I'm David.' And the rest is history."

"That is the most romantic thing I ever heard," Shepard said.

"Hey, come on. What about when we met?"

"Come on yourself. Theirs is like the plot of a romance novel. Not a trashy one either. Like a real-life, make your heart ache love story."

"I'll tell them you said so. It'll embarrass the hell out of them."

"Oh my god, they sound like the most precious people in the world."

"They're all right," he grinned.

"I'm serious. Do you know how lucky you are? To be able to have a story like that?"

And Kaidan realized what it was that made her eyes so bright despite her grin, that made her lips tremble slightly before she bit down. There had been no father in her life, and she never saw two parents who blatantly, obviously adored each other. "I'm sorry –"

"Ah, don't be. I can live vicariously through you and your parents."

And he thought of the four of them, at his home, seated around the dinner table. His dad wouldn't say much, but he knew that he and Shepard would like each other, because they were military; staunchly devoted to duty, rigid in their routines. Mom would gush, he knew; she wouldn't be able to keep her hands to herself. But as he saw their faces in his memory he remembered that they weren't home in Vancouver but possibly running for their lives, trying to stay one step ahead of the Reapers. They could be dead for all he knew. And his smile faltered.

"Hey," Shepard said quietly, and she brought her hand to his cheek. "Your dad is Alliance. He knows what to do in situations like these. They're all right."

"Yeah," he echoed. He tried to see it; the two of them running through the trees, Dad's old guns strapped to his waist and back, the weathered sniper rifle firm in his hands. But try as he might, he could not shake the feeling that he had seen the last of his parents all those months ago, on a seemingly nondescript day that smelled like apples and beer and sunlight.

"Would you play something for me?" Shepard asked him. Swallowing, he pushed away those memories because they would not serve him here, not on this last day before they rejoined the war, not when the only moments they would be able to keep were a glance met on the battlefield, or a few hours of sleep entwined in her cabin.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm nowhere as good as my mom, though. Just to warn you."

"Uh huh."

"I'm serious. It's been at least two years since I played at all."

"I bet you're still fantastic. It's not like you can unlearn how to play the piano."

"Well, you get pretty bad if you don't practice every day."

"Then I'm bound to sound terrible. Don't tell me you're shy?"

"Ha! Of course not."

"Then get serenading, Alenko."

It had been at least two years, but Kaidan had played the piano alongside his mom since he was five years old. There was no time or space to play in the Alliance, but on leave he'd come up and play double concertos with his mom, Mozart and Mendelssohn. And though he never reached her level of ability or musicality, it remained, burned into the muscles in his hands, so that when he laid them over the piano keys in the shape of the first chord, it was like he'd never really stopped.

He played the Rachmaninoff prelude he'd learned before joining the Alliance, before Conatix and BAaT, before his life had veered off the course he'd taken for granted in those young days. It was old music, but there was unspeakable beauty in the spaces between the chords, in the cascading arpeggios, in each note sustained in the air, filling the room like light.

It wasn't like the beginning, when he tried to emulate the expressions and affectations his mother applied to the music; he saw the notes in a different way now. He was inclined toward softness, sostenuto, toward introspective phrasing that took a fine ear to detect. He saw the lines in a logical way, where she had been moved to feeling by suggestion and extremes.

He stumbled on quite a few notes because he was out of practice, and the piano was something that required diligence and discipline just as much as marksmanship. But Shepard did not laugh or make any other sound; she watched him with wide, worshipful eyes, and he wondered if she saw him in the same way that his father had seen his mother, all those years ago.

It wasn't a perfect performance by any stretch, but when he finished Shepard did not seem able to speak for a few moments. "I should have known," she said finally.

"Should have known what?"

"That 'out of practice' for a guy who got three off a perfect score in his Tech Situationals is still far better than most people could ever manage."

"Ah, come on. It wasn't really that good."

"Nope. Shut up. Not having this conversation with you."

"You make me out to be some modest jerk when really I am out of practice. Those runs were sloppy. And I was never a professional like Mom."

"Oh my god, I could smack you," she said, but instead she elbowed him in the ribs, grinning when he yelped.

"Hey – ouch. You said you played?"

"There is no way in hell I'm following that performance. No way no how."

"Come on. I'm a forgiving audience."

"Who I know is humoring me. Nope. Not going to do it."

"What if I ask nicely?" he said, grinning. Before she could protest, he slid his hand up her thigh, seeking warmer skin, feeling it burn under his palm. To her credit she did not flinch away.

"You think I'll be more inclined to give you what you want after you've distracted me?"

"It's worked before."

"You are a terrible person."

"You like this kind of terrible."

She said nothing at first, but he felt her respond to his touch, arching into his hands, shifting closer so that they were pressed together, only separate by a few slim layers of fabric, and he knew that she must have wanted it all morning, since she'd first seen him over the piano. When he kissed her neck, she made a breathy sound in the back of her throat that shot straight through his groin, and he pulled her closer, his hands sliding up her shirt, his lips trailing fire.

"Damn it," she whispered, her hands twisting in his hair.

His reply was to kiss her deeply.

He was filled with the electric scent of her, submerged in the music of her breathing. When he kissed her, each was a new refrain on a familiar theme that he knew he would spend his whole life learning, worshiping, protecting as the precious thing it was. When he caught a flash of her smile, he framed it between his hands so he would always remember it.

She took his hand and made to lead him to the bedroom, but he caught her and pulled her into his chest, threading his hands through her hair, kissing her feverishly. He unwrapped her layer by layer – the boxers she'd stolen from him, the tank top that bagged over her stomach, the flimsy little cotton wrap she'd slung around her shoulders – until she stood bare before him, half-haloed by light. She slid her hands under the waist of his pants and with a coy grin pushed them away, so when he pulled her to his chest again, they were no longer separate by layers, and he was fully able to feel the softness of her skin against his own.

He did not lie her down on the couch or drape her over the piano, like he had planned; driven half mad by his desire, he pushed her against the wall with so much force that she gasped, her wide-eyed gaze snapping up to his. But he could not apologize, because she was kissing him again, more fiercely than before, so fiercely that his heart pounded and his head spun. She wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, and so joined he plunged into her, his moan muffled into her neck, his hands curling over the bare skin of her back.

They made love right there in the living room with the blinds half-lidded, filling the room with light from the nebula, so that if he looked at her from the corner of his eye he might have thought she was a column of white flame, burning under his ravenous hands. But he didn't look at her out of the corner of his eye; he drank the sight of her, ravenously as a starving man. He burned the sight of her into his memory – the way her breasts moved with each thrust, the shape of her mouth, the pale column of her neck exposed when she threw back her head. And always her hands, pressing him to her tightly, gripping with feverish intent. Where she led he followed; the pattern her hips made against his, the strength of her, the softness, the feel of her there – oh god – and always the light and sound, in this burning, sunlight room.

He came down from that high place, but slowly. He was aware of small things, one after another; a bead of sweat sliding down the trench of his spine, his hair pressed to his brow, and Shepard there – her heavy breathing a perfect duet to his. She kissed him again, but this kiss was slow and gentle, sated and sweet; she brought her lips to the skin at his temple and savored the thrilling pulse, and there she remained until his heart had slowed.

"God," he breathed.

"I get the feeling you've had this your mind for a while."

"Since I woke up."

She grinned, brought her hands to his face. "Nice of you to let me sleep."

"I knew we'd get around to it eventually."

"Be still my heart." But she kissed him again, and he let himself soften against her lips, that sweet argument.

"Now you can't possibly say no to playing a little for me," he teased her, nipping her ear.

"God damn it," she said again. "I could certainly try."

"I might have to work you over again."

"You realize you're all but guaranteeing a no answer, right?"

"Don't be so stubborn."

"You like it. You think it's cute."

"Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's frustrating."

"Hmph. I'm just warning you right now that I'm terrible. I never had a real piano or a real method. I just tried to pick up a few things by ear. All right?"

"You act like I'll yell at you if you don't sufficiently impress me."

"Not yell," she said, frowning.

But without another word, she took a seat at the piano and stretched her beautiful hands over the keys. And as she played, he marveled at the sight of her, bare as the light that caught in her hair, her fingers the lacked the dexterity of a professional but more than made up for it with soul, with expression. He knew as she played that the music was not a composition of an old master but a melody she had summoned herself, and by that virtue it was even more precious.

Their leave was over and the culmination of their war loomed, but he did not inhabit those thoughts as he watched her that last day. Instead, he only inhabited her; this home he had found, this woman that he loved.


End file.
